Many industries such as electric utilities, mining operations, and water utilities employ industrial automation systems which include a relatively large number of industrial assets. An industrial asset may, for example, include one or more of industry infrastructure, operating equipment, tangible equipment, physical equipment, and processing equipment. An industrial asset may have an intrinsic value based upon one or more parameters including, but not limited to, products produced using the industrial asset, operating costs of the industrial asset, and losses associated with use of the industrial asset. An industrial asset may be serviceable as a set of components or as a single entity.
An example of an industry that employs an industrial automation system including industrial assets is an electric utility company. An electric utility company may include a power transmission and distribution system. The power transmission and distribution system includes a plurality of industrial assets, including, for example, transmission lines, substations, transformers, circuit breakers, inverters, controllers, power sources, power storage devices, and other types of industrial assets. The management of such industrial assets may include industrial asset operation, industrial asset maintenance, industrial asset health monitoring, and industrial asset inventory tracking.
Industrial automation systems, in different embodiments, include a distributed asset control system and a supervisory control system. These systems can be operated from a control room with an operator or operators who are in charge of reviewing the status of the industrial automation system, as well as disseminating information provided by either the distributed asset control system or the supervisory control system as needed to field of facility personnel. For instance in one procedure, at the end of a work day, a facility operator might inform the next shift operator(s) or back office support staff about critical issues and observations.
The amount of information generated by the distributed asset control system and the supervisory control system is not only substantial, but is also highly complex. As the amount of information being generated by a data acquisition system running in parallel with the distributed asset and supervisory control systems, the operators will be inundated with data. Because value determinations regarding data content needs to be made, the operator can become a bottleneck in the dissemination of information. What is needed therefore is a solution to the problem of the centralized role of an operator who decides with whom and when to share data. What is needed, therefore, is an improved system and method for managing an industrial system and, in particular, industrial system automation.